The present disclosure is directed to control systems for multi-camera electronic devices.
There are a wide variety of camera designs that find application in modern consumer electronic devices. For example, compact cameras and single-lens reflex cameras tend to be fairly complex camera systems that provide control over a relatively wide range of operational parameters, such as focus distance, zoom, exposure time, iris control, shutter speed and the like. Other camera systems, particularly those that integrate a camera system into a multifunction consumer electronics device such as a smartphone, tablet computer or notebook computer, tend to be much simpler. They may provide a degree of control, for example, over focus distance and/or exposure time but their designs may not permit variation of other parameters such as optical zoom or iris aperture. The level of complexity of an individual camera system often dictates a cost associated with that camera system.
Traditionally, multifunction consumer electronics devices employed either a single camera system or multiple camera systems looking in opposite directions to capture image data. The cameras of such devices were very simple, with limited focus capability and often no control over optical zoom or other operational parameters. Recently, some consumer devices have integrated multiple camera systems that have overlapping fields of view, each with different, fixed optical properties. For example, one camera system may have a relatively wide field of view and another camera system may have a narrower field of view. In such cameras, users must expressly select which of the camera systems is to be used for image capture. Such selections are cumbersome for users and introduces delay into image capture operations, which can cause image capture opportunities to be lost if an imaging subject changes.
The inventors propose techniques to remedy these disadvantages.